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We can no longer operate on the assumption that the Western capitalist culture of self-contained individualism is superior to all other cultural forms and continue to encode those values in the practice of psychoanalysis.

The psychoanalysis of self psychology serves an implicit social function in seamlessly hiding the contradictions in the economic, political and cultural arrangements of our society by not analyzing them, and therefore allowing them to remain as unconscious determinants of suffering.

Culture and Psychoanalysis  Human suffering often may stem from the way that the culture promotes the pursuit of impossible ideals and unlimited narcissistic gratification that serves an unacknowledged economic purpose benefiting some members of society at the cost of others... Advertising fans the flames of widespread and insatiable narcissis... See more

We must also include in our clinical theories the psychological misery occasioned by actual and often ongoing experiences of social oppression. In part, such socialized misery may be internalized and perpetuated by an individual’s use of mechanisms such as identification with the aggressor, dissociation, denial, and projective identification, which... See more

A traditional ego-psychology analysis typically focuses on analyzing the patient’s inner life as the main source of problems. In contrast, a relational analyst emphasizes not only the patient’s inner life, but also the mutual relational dynamics of the therapeutic interaction in the session.

Relational psychoanalytic models, sometimes referred to as intersubjective, do not view individuals as discrete centers of experience and action; instead, they assert that all self-experience is ontologically social. They challenge the “myth of the isolated mind” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 7) and suggest that psychological experience is derived... See more

Arguably, liberal individualism, social Darwinism, and free-market theory are transforms of one another, deriving their basic assumptions from the same atomistic and hierarchical worldview, all containing elitist principles (meritocracy, survival of the fittest, and plutocracy) and all with the consequent stratifications of race, gender, ethnicity,... See more

Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin’s own comments regarding the survival value of the social instincts are widely ignored. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described how animal species in which cooperation among individuals replaced competitive struggle were able to secure the best conditions for survival. He implied that, in such cases, the fit... See more

Peter Kropotkin spend 5 years observing animals in the wilds of Siberia, and having read Darwin, sought to replicate his opersations of the competitive struggle of species in the wild.